There’s something about the idea of a “new beginning” that always makes me feel slightly uneasy. It’s one of those fleeting emotions that linger on the fringe of consciousness, hard – if not downright impossible – to pin down, yet all the more persistent, quite akin to a vague physical uneasiness preceding the advent of nausea.

And you know how it is: man is rarely ever wrong when he feels that he’s about to vomit.

From out of many mysteriously nauseating “new beginning” thought models, we’ll investigate two that are more often than not closely related, or even identical: conspiracy theory and historical revisionism.

I use the first term in a strictly pejorative sense of a “theory of everything”, which takes as it’s starting point one simple principle and then proceeds to explain away more-or-less everything from it.

I use the second term in a sense akin to so-called “Holocaust revisionism” in it’s most radical sense, i.e. an idea that proposes that something we formerly never doubted, like the destruction of European Jews on a mass scale in WWII, didn’t happen at all.

So, not to get confused in advance, my treatment of those two terms is very specific: they’ve got little or nothing to do with a genuine pursuit of truth in history and the nature of our political reality.